Sy got a new toy
Sy rubbed her eyes and blinked against the dryness. It was stupid staying up til 3 AM when she was expected on a welding job the next day, but with her new project this close to completion she couldn't help herself. That chip she got from Brian's shop earlier the same day was the last piece of the puzzle, hardware-wise, and she figured she finally got everything right in the software department to get the whole damn module up and running. She turned her hand around in front of her eyes. The glove she was wearing was lined with minute wires, converging on the tiny chip in the center of the palm. Gleaming threads ran up the fingers, dotted with several kinds of scanners, most of them illicit, a couple with Sevo's nano-engraved logo. One wire sprouted off the wrist and connected to her temple, updating the programming modules in her eye with information that glowed in mid-air, an impossibly quickly scrolling mass of text that indicated her program was compiling, hopefully for the last time. The wall of text suddenly stopped. Sy gasped, her heart skipping a beat. Done, it said at the end of the scroll. She blinked a few times, the result of the compile showing with her eyes closed as well as open. "Aww yeah," she whispered, grinning like a lunatic and feeling a lot less sleepy all of a sudden. She loaded the program. At first it seemed like nothing was happening. She twisted her gloved hand left and right, disappointment creeping in, but relief and renewed anticipation overwhelmed her when she realized she had depth and sensitivity set to 0. Tweaking the numbers upwards a notch, she held the glove over her arm. A lattice around her muscles, inside her skin, lit up with a blue glow: the standard atmospheric stabilizer Sevotech. She adjusted the depth and the scan picked up the bone grafts they were connected to. It was all AR, of course, but more than enough for her. She sat in wonder for a moment, thinking about how a bunch of technology inside her skin could feel so normal and natural. Then her grin widened and without thinking, she cranked up the depth and sensitivity all the way. A bright flash made her cry out. Closing her eyes made no difference. She reeled back, her animal instincts causing her to shake her head and squeeze her eyes shut uselessly, the light bypassing her eyes, being directly pumped into her optic nerves. Waving and thrashing her hand just caused the light to flicker and oscillate in a billion abstract shapes and patterns. She yanked the cord from her temple, and everything went black. She sat, panting, sweating, the adrenaline still racing through her, on the floor of her bedroom. She dreaded to face the truth. Had she just gone blind? Then she realized she still had her eyes closed. She opened them, tentatively, and there was her bedroom, the floor covered in bits of wire, solder, tongs, clippers and a hundred other components, among a few dust nests and empty snack bags. Sy began to laugh, and laugh hard. She clutched her belly as great, big, wheezing waves of laughter toppled her and sent her lying on the component-strewn floor, a few bits of circuitry pricking her uncovered back. "Oh my God, Sy," she said aloud to herself between gales of laughter, "you're a fucking idiot!" She laughed until it died down to giggles and the sharp edges pressing on her naked back became more and more uncomfortable. She pushed herself up, a circuit board momentarily sticking to her back before clattering to the ground. She grabbed the loose wire and reconnected it to her temple. The overwhelming light only flashed for a moment as she immediately turned the sensitivity and depth down to 0. "Aight, note to self," she said, the aftershocks of the laughter still pulsing through her body and prolonging the idiotic grin on her face. "Put a hard limit on the sensitivity and depth, and get this baby secure as an OCON vault 'fore I get it put in my arm." She turned the sliders up again and toyed with zooming and inspecting the tech in her arm. "This baby gon' change everything," she whispered to herself. Half an hour later, she'd securely locked the glove away and laid down in bed in nothing but her panties. Her heart was still pounding with excitement. She grabbed her burner phone from the nightstand and dictated a short message. "Sentry, need a favor. Need a guy to put some custom tech in my arm. D'y'know a guy? And you got any mod jobs layin' round? I could use me a couple Clicks to pay whoever gon' cut me up. ttyl." She sent the message, turned over, and promptly failed to fall asleep for another hour.